Title text: Some say the world will end in fire; some say in segfaults.

Explanation

This comic presents a poem about a god's dilemma of whether to create the world using Perl or Lisp, two popular computer programming languages. The god has chosen to write it in Perl but since then appears to lament the choice, apparently expressing that if given the chance to write the world's code again, he or she or it would use Lisp instead.

The grammar of Lisp as a language requires the programmer to use a multitude of parentheses, and in many cases it can be difficult to determine whether all of the parentheses have been properly matched up to one another. In fact, Lisp programs will often run, possibly incorrectly, even if there are mismatched parentheses or parentheses missing where they should be present, and so, many Lisp programmers will simply throw extra close-parentheses at the end of their programs to ensure that they do not have too few. The last two lines of the poem refer to the plentiful parentheses in Lisp. The image at the bottom of the panel shows a close-parenthesis at the end of the Universe looking like a shock wave.

A segmentation fault, also commonly called a segfault, is an error that occurs when a computer program attempts to access computer memory to which it should not have access.

This comic might possibly be alluding back to #224: Lisp, in which one of "the gods" claims that although the Universe may appear to have been written in Lisp, it was actually written mostly using Perl.

The poem itself and the title text are a parody of "Fire and Ice," written by Robert Frost and first published in 1920. In this poem, the speaker discusses his stance in the debate on whether the world will be destroyed in fire or in ice. "A God's Lament" has a rhyme scheme that is nearly identical to that of Frost's poem. However, it differs in that "Lisp" does not rhyme with "men," "again," and "paren," while the corresponding four lines in Frost's poem do rhyme.

Discussion

Since the wiki is so new, I thought I'd motivate a discussion about the topic here, first, rather than just blindly charging in and mucking up the text on the main page. Later, if there's no objection, I'll merge the points here into the main page.

A few clarifications.

The description is flawed somewhat, in that Lisp (which adherents humorously "insist" means "Lots of Insidiously Silly Parens") is in fact very strict about matching parens. The problem is that parens are ubiquitous; every nontrivial expression starts with an opening paren, and ends with a close paren. This differs from Perl, which, depending on how it's written, may end with a semicolon, closing curly brace, or sometimes even another character.

The comparison between Perl and Lisp is a little off the mark, too. Lisp is a very simple language (structurally; I shan't vouch for conceptually) which has the "elegant" characteristic that programs and data are essentially the same thing: lists of sub-expressions. It is quite easy for a Lisp program to build a data structure which is itself a runnable program. This "feature" is frequently exploited in artificial intelligence circles. Perl, on the other hand, is a haphazard accretion of syntactic oddities so complex that the grammar cannot be modeled using standard compiler tools. On the other hand, it can, with an economy of syntax, perform some very powerful operations, and has a vast library of utility functions that make very complex operations "easy" to do.

Now, putting on the Opinion hat, my take is that the suggestion that the universe is written in Perl refers to the "messiness" of physics, chaos theory, and the like, somehow being attributed to the quirks surfaced by the implementation; if it were to be done again the comparative "elegance" of Lisp would, one is led to believe, result in a universe that at some fundamental level was simpler and more consistent, with predictable beginning and end.

To what degree is the rigidity of matching parentheses a feature of Lisp and not a feature of specific implementations of it? I remember one of my professors telling me that they used to just throw a bunch of parentheses at the end of the program. I know in at least one implementation, there is at least a variable that, when true, causes the interpreter to ignore extra right parentheses. As for Perl, if you wish to add more information to the explanation about it, then I'd say go ahead. However, at present there's not really any comparison between the two languages at all in the text. I didn't feel that it was especially necessary to understand the details of Perl to get the comic, so I didn't describe it beyond calling it a popular computer programming language. Erenan (talk) 12:03, 1 August 2012 (EDT)

Lisp rhymes with myth and with, but only if you have a lithp. Think he did that on purpose?
108.162.238.157 14:18, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

I'd just like to point out that I was randomly sent to a few before this comic after first reading #859 ( ( ) thus leaving me oddly satisfied... 108.162.216.147 08:04, 22 July 2015 (UTC)

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